Review of Holy Motors (2012) by Mazomba — 25 Mar 2013

Few films of late have engaged my deepest emotional inhibitions, challenged my understanding of filmmaking, and beckoned me to substitute personal meaning for visual substance. Holy Motors, the newest flick from French filmmaker Leos Carax, does this and so much more.

To classify this film as "weird" would be to describe Gary Busey as "quirky." When you think that this movie has gone completely off-the-rails, taken its many characters to the deepest bounds of the imagination, Holy Motors aims only to usher you further into the madness occurring on screen.

Holy Motors revolves around a day in the life of Mr. Oscar, a working Frenchman, who appears to take on the role of various characters in different scenes, each more bewildering than the next. Mr. Oscar, driven around in a limo, stops at different areas of town to portray a certain cinematic scene or emotion.

After finishing his role as a given character, the man returns to the limousine. These jobs range from motion-capture performer to homeless beggar to audacious assassin. The viewer cannot believe what he or she is witnessing.

If you can, you have more serious issues to worry about. What makes Holy Motors so compelling is its continuous neglect of deeper meaning. While interpretations can be drawn from the memorable images appearing in view of the camera, the film always challenges such an interpretation by creating a next scene even more ridiculous and unbound by conventional tactics.

Does Leos Carax suggest deeper parables when he has a naked, flower-eating psychotic rest in the lap of Eva Mendes? To be honest, I am not positive that he does. If the true purpose of Holy Motors is that it has no purpose, then maybe it is that odd absurdity that elevates the film to greatness.

Mr. Oscar's jobs start off comically-insane and quickly turn clinically-insane, yet there are unexplainable moments of triumph layered throughout the work. Two music scenes, one in which Mr. Oscar and friends begin a full-scale folk jam, and another in which Kylie Minogue herself sings as if she is part of an elaborate musical, provide the harmony that unexpectedly serves to tie the seemingly unconnected scenes of the movie together.

Denis Lavant turns in the single greatest acting performance of 2012 on the big screen. Lavant did not receive a well-deserved Oscar or Golden Globe nomination, yet he turned one of the most ill-beckoning and demanding roles ever created for film, into an off-putting and stunningly-real depiction of a man with the world's most complex list of chores to finish by supper time.

The aforementioned Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue only appear in the film for one extended scene each, yet both appear viable in the mad world of Leos Carax. The entire movie can be summed up in the final scene, in which Mr.

Oscar's limo sits in a garage. What follows appears so childish, so mundane, it retains and exposes the spirit of the entire film. Just when you think the film might become overtly symbolic or suggestive of a non-literal interpretation, Carax includes a scene which completely jets things back to Never-Never-Land.

And that is why it is so good. Irreverent and incomprehensible, unemotional and magnanimous, Holy Motors represents one of the top cinematic achievements of the year and an absolute must-see.